Alan Perlis Quotes

Even if you're going into a field that has nothing to do with computer science, just having that way of analytical thinking and being able to process information and break it down is important no matter what you're doing. Having that knowledge of code is something that you can apply to your daily life.

I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more important. Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.

Everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer, because it teaches you how to think.

And, I think that is actually appropriate because I'm really not the world's best programmer, I think it's a good thing that I'm not touching the code.

It always helps to be a good programmer. It is important to like computers and to be able to think of things people would want to do with their computers.

The three chief virtues of a programmer are: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris.

I am always fascinated by the structure of things; why do things work this way and not that way.

What I knew was I liked math and science, and I never wanted to memorize everything. I wanted to understand where it came from.

If you have an analytical bent like I do, going back to my days as a programmer, you like to ask questions.

I have the ability to get code done, but I'm impatient, and it's scrappy as a result. Maybe that helped me with 'Minecraft,' as it came quickly. But, well, at some point, I'd like to actually become a good programmer.

Encourage public schools to teach American children how to code just after they learn to multiply.

I like science and mathematics. When I say mathematics, I don't mean algebra or math in that sense, but the mathematics of things.

If you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?

I'm not a real programmer. I throw together things until it works then I move on. The real programmers will say Yeah it works but you're leaking memory everywhere. Perhaps we should fix that. I'll just restart Apache every 10 requests.

The effective exploitation of his powers of abstraction must be regarded as one of the most vital activities of a competent programmer.

Talk about rationality can get very confusing unless the things with which rationality deals are also included.

The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with judiciously placed print statements.

I think that computer programming shows in my writing. Often when I write about computer programmers I'll write about the way that they see the world and they structure the world.

The analytical power should not be confounded with simple ingenuity; for while the analyst is necessarily ingenious, the ingenious man is often remarkably incapable of analysis.

Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.

Learning to write programs stretches your mind, and helps you think better, creates a way of thinking about things that I think is helpful in all domains.

Instruction tables will have to be made up by mathematicians with computing experience and perhaps a certain puzzle-solving ability. There need be no real danger of it ever becoming a drudge, for any processes that are quite mechanical may be turned over to the machine itself.

When somebody has learned how to program a computer ... You're joining a group of people who can do incredible things. They can make the computer do anything they can imagine.

In this respect a program is like a poem: you cannot write a poem without writing it. Yet people talk about programming as if it were a production process and measure "programmer productivity" in terms of "number of lines of code produced". In so doing they book that number on the wrong side of the ledger: we should always refer to "the number of lines of code spent".

Excusing bad programming is a shooting offence, no matter what the circumstances.